Jerusalem has safe skies - for now.
I remember the welcoming feeling, 18 months ago, on returning to the capital after two days in the north during the Second Lebanon War. Up there - standing on Haifa’s hillsides, ears filling with siren screams and eyes straining out across the bay to where invisible and deadly rockets were winging their way towards us - the feeling of vulnerability was acute. Driving through the Galilee, with the hills smoking on either side, the inner cringing and subconscious bracing for impact leaped up again as the sirens sounded once more; it didn’t matter where we were - anywhere north of Haifa my scalp would be prickling with the sense of what could be hanging literally over my head.
And yet, I could balance that uneasiness against the fact that the potential targets of Hizb’allah’s high-explosives were many and covered a wide area. Apart from Haifa and the Kirya, there was Har Meron and Tsfat (Safed), Rosh Pinna, Kiryat Shemona and Metulla, each surrounded by open countryside dotted with fields and fishponds. There were plenty of places the rockets could fall, minimizing the chance they’d hit me.
At night in my hotel, I could hear the boom of rockets hitting all around, but safely afar off. And yet, there was the uneasiness, the defenselessness; intense enough so that when I got back home and walked the city streets, I really felt the freedom from fear under Jerusalem’s safe skies.
Today, early in the morning, we leave that safe, if grey, covering once again, this time heading from the mountains of Judea south-east down toward the coastal plain. Rolling hills give way to fields, lush-green all around us in these early days of March. Roads busy with traffic, life around us is buzzing with the normalcy of a working week-day.
It takes little more than an hour to reach our destination. Behind me, my wife is safely walking our children to school. But for me and my companions, after just this short drive, we’ve left the peace for a war zone. The skies here are also grey, but now they’re ominous too. Like an unwelcome guest, the sense of vulnerability returns. My scalp prickles. At any moment, projectiles can be coming towards us through the air.
This time, the target area is small: If Israel is a plastered wall, Sderot is the dart board hanging there. And if Sderot is the dart board, we feel like we’re right in the bull’s eye.
“It’s not a question of whether something will happen” Joel, a fellow journalist, says as we pull up outside the town’s central ambulance station, parking among the eight or nine ambulances that stand ready in the street. “It’s not a question of if something will happen. It will happen. The question is just, when?”
Less than 30 minutes after we arrive, it turns out.
“Tseva Adom! Tseva Adom! Ttseva Adom!” (Color Red! Color Red! Color Red!) The metallic voice sounds through the town-wide alarm system, and people start running for shelter. They have between 15 and 20 seconds before the rockets, fired by Arabs in Gaza, come hurtling into the town.
The ambulance crews beckon us into their security room, and we quickly and quietly file our way downstairs, our ears peeled. Before we even reach the shelter, with its bunk beds lining the walls, the sound of detonations reach our ears. A minute later, the all clear returns us to the street.
Two rockets landed just outside the town, we’re told. No one was hurt. Over an aid worker’s radio we hear details of what happened in Ashkelon minutes before: a Katyusha or Grad rocket (twin-engined, longer-range, larger warhead) hit a seven story building there. Twenty-eight people are wounded; miraculously none killed.
But for now, the ambulances in Sderot are not needed. “Please God we’ll have a quiet day,” an aid worker tells us as we move on.
Lots of police vehicles line the street outside the main police station. Two sport license plates indicating that some of the country’s most senior policemen are in town. There is no spokesman available, but we’re taken out back to view the racks of used Kassam rockets that have hit Sderot. They’re crude; pipes with vanes and warheads. The casings are thick; upon exploding they spray jagged pieces of steel around them, tearing flesh, destroying limbs and lives.
Then we drop by the fire station next door and talk to the men there. “Our first priority on arriving at an attack scene is to save lives and care for the wounded,” one firefighter stresses, in answer to our questions. Only then is structural damage seen to - ruptured gas mains, holed walls and roofs, and downed power lines repaired.
Compared to yesterday and the weekend, it’s quiet. I relax a little as we head to the “To Go” restaurant to meet with Geut.
Geut Aragon’s photograph, her head bloody and draped in bandages, stares at us out from the cover of a recent Christian Edition of The Jerusalem Post. Today she looks well, if tired. One of the media workers who helped set up this interview had said earlier Geut did not feel up to talking to the press today. But she had changed her mind.
We sit on the small patio and within minutes she has launched into her story of what happened on January 15. I’m running it as she told it:
“I will never forget it,” she says, quietly. “It was about five in the afternoon. We were at home; me and my little boy Nir, now four years old, and his friend who had come to play with him, she is five years old. They started playing downstairs and they asked me to put on the computer. And the computer is upstairs in his room. And I’m like, ‘Children, you know what, it’s not safe upstairs, I will put you something else on the TV.” And you know what, the children, they insisted that day. ‘Please put it on for us; we’ve had TV all day, TV - we can’t go outside even to the playground.” So I said, “Okay, just a few minutes, okay?’
“So we go upstairs and I sit in front of the computer, and just at that moment my little boy asked me to go to the toilet, ‘Mommy, mommy!’ So I’m like, ‘Go, hurry up.’ And he went out and was just standing by the door.
“There was no alarm; there was no tseva adom. It was like a great big boom. I know for the first second I was unconscious. And when I woke up it was like, what happened? Then I started to hear them screaming. The little girl was next to me and I could not see anything. Everything was black and I just heard the two screaming, ‘Mommy! mommy!’
“They were in a panic; they were hurt; they were bleeding. I was bleeding all over; my head was hurt so I didn’t stop bleeding, and I’m like, what shall I do? Oh, my God, they are children!
“I don’t know how to describe to you the way I felt at that horrible moment, and the way they screamed, ‘Help us! Help us! Mommy! Mommy!’
“I started to try to get up and I could not, so I started to crawl on the floor to search for the little girl. I touched pieces of the roof and the wall and suddenly I felt her arm and pushed her very hard, and took her and started to find the way out from the room while my boy screamed and cried and panicked….it seemed like forever.
“I’m like, please God send someone to save us. I got out of the room, and the moment I pushed the door my little boy was standing there. I did not know what I looked like. He was standing there and me and the girl were standing there and he stopped breathing in shock. Then he was screaming, ‘Mommy! Mommy! Blood! Blood!’ He turned his back to me, too afraid to see me. I took them and started to go downstairs, and I feel like I must take them downstairs before the house falls down on us. When I got to the front door there was the ambulance, the paramedics, all the people. They checked us and took us to the hospital.
“Every day, the moment I hear the alarm, I cover my ears and until now I just hear the screaming of those two children. Back then I was told I was badly hurt in my head and my leg. A large piece of shrapnel in my knee and three pieces in my head; one into the brain, so they do not want to touch it so it is still there…. I am still doing treatment and seeing doctors, and it’s very, very hard. The children need to have care, special psychologists take care of them; they don’t sleep at night and until today they start crying when they hear the alarm…they are so afraid. It is very hard to live in such a place that you don’t have the chance to recover. Every day gets harder and harder…. People saw the pictures and they came to see me in the hospital. And if you see the room, the whole second floor, it was horrible and the people said it was a miracle, a big miracle; one chance in a million that with a direct hit like that we came out of this room. I know it was a miracle and I thank God it was a miracle…”
Geut said all Sderot’s people “are very, very afraid. Some don’t go out at all; they do their shopping and everything by telephone because every day different houses are being hit…more than once in a day, every day, sometimes every 20 seconds….”
She believes “the government is trying everything [but] it’s not human to live like this. It’s hard to say – because I have two boys and one day they will also go to the army and will fight – but I feel that our army does not do enough because years ago there was a war in the north and … they protected all the people that lived there, and here in the south we don’t feel that they protect us; I know we are all afraid to lose soldiers but that’s why we have an army.”
Subdued, we wish her well. After lunch - “To Go’s” small kitchen turns them out to order so the food is fresh, tasty, inexpensive - we head for a second rendezvous.
This next experience will be the most harrowing.
Chava Gad meets us downtown and we drive her the five minutes to her home. She asks whether we would like to talk to her inside or outside. The sun has started to peep through, warming and coloring the air. “Outside would be best,” we agree.
Nervously, Chava insists on first opening the door into her apartment block so that, if necessary, she can quickly get inside. Three floors above us, a blackened window and burned gables show where a rocket scored a direct hit.
As she touches the latch, the alarm breaks out: “Tseva Adom! Tseva Adom!” Quickly, we are ushered indoors. Chava grabs a small boy and leads us into the hallway – a relatively safe place to stand.
Bending protectively over Yanai, her nine-year-old, Chava pulls him close, whispering calming words through her own clenched teeth; encouraging him to breathe slowly, deeply.
Through the rasping of the alarm, the whimpering sounds of the child fighting sheer terror pierces my heart. Then Yanai gasps, together with his mom, at the first explosion, some distance away. The second, closer, is much louder; we feel the shock waves. More seconds drag out, and then it’s over.
Last week, they were going through this 15 to 20 times a day.
Chava doses Yanai with syrup – a natural remedy to calm him, she says. Her whole body is shaking, as if chilled, as she takes the valium she needs before sitting down, still quivering, to talk. For nearly an hour, while Yanai alternately potters around the kitchen and hurls himself on and off the couch, Chava pours out her heart, describing how so many facets of life have been destroyed for so many in Sderot. And still, even as she expresses bewilderment at the circumstances she is in, the woman insists she still believes in, and hopes for, peace.
Chava’s story, as she recounted it, will be posted here soon.
While we’re talking, a young policeman enters from an inside room – pistol on his hip, girl with a large helium balloon at his side. He’s her first-born, Chava says proudly. And it’s his 21st birthday today. They will leave the house, between rocket attacks, to celebrate. I wonder where.
An hour later we are heading back to Jerusalem. But our thoughts are back there with Yanai’s family, and with all the others who have lived under rocket attacks for a period that has lasted nearly twice as long as World War 2.
How easy things are for us as, winding our way up through the hills, we look forward to being once again under the friendly skies over the ancient city of King David.
Then one of my companions bursts that bubble. “The rockets will be falling here too, one day,” he says.
Despite the pain, anguish and fear suffered by the Israeli people in the past two years, their leaders seem unable to learn the lessons inflicted as a result of the Lebanon withdrawal and the Gaza “disengagement.”
Certainly, if they continue in the direction they insist on following despite the daily intensifying danger, it is only a matter of time – and not much of that – before Jerusalem’s skies rain rockets too.
How much we need to pray, for the people of Sderot, Ashkelon, and indeed for all Israel. And how we, gentiles, need to speak out against the concerted effort of our nations that continue to work, inexorably, towards the dividing up of this land and the weakening to ultimate destruction, of this people.
